Alain Badiou places his philosophy unequivocally under the sign of affirmation, insisting that: ‘[philosophy] must break with whatever leads it through nihilistic detours, that is, with everything that restrains and obliterates affirmative power’. This affirmative philosophy was originally politically conditioned by May '68, which derailed Badiou from the expected bourgeois coordinates of his life. The difference between Badiou and many of the other thinkers of his generation is that he has always, to use his own term, retained fidelity to this inheritance. The nostalgic or dismissive image of Badiou as the last soixante- huitard is, however, deceptive. What matters more is Badiou's effort to maintain a thought of rupture, not by simply repeating revolutionary dogma but by adapting his thinking to persist in unpropitious times. His affirmative conception of philosophy was explicitly formulated in terms of maintaining resistance in the face of the weakening of thought associated with the 1980s (and dating for Badiou from 1976). Although Badiou's thinking was initially conditioned by an external event of rupture he has developed and elaborated that thought in the seeming absence of such events. To hold on in this state of absence, Badiou implies, requires an affirmative thinking unwilling to concede to the doxa of ‘weak thought’ or to a negative dialectics that finds itself all too consonant with contemporary ideology.